


You Are A Dog

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, M/M, Puppies, Teenlock, sherlock is a confused little thing, sweet baby irish setter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-23
Packaged: 2018-01-09 20:05:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1150221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which we watch Sherlock Holmes fall in love with John Watson, through the eyes of Redbeard. </p>
<p>A fic in seven parts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are A Dog

**Author's Note:**

> You could not begin to imagine how in love I am with the idea of teenage Sherlock and his Irish Setter friend. Well...perhaps you could, seeing as I've penned this Redbeard-centric fic.

You are a dog, and you are told your name is Redbeard, and you are sauntering around the house in which you live for many hours, waiting for your person to come back home to you. 

You are a dog, and so you cannot explain exactly why you are so overjoyed, flooded with passion, elated, positively ebullient when your person comes home to you, because you have never been very good with articulating the way you feel about the world or people or things. But you know that when you hear the door open and those very familiar footfalls on the rug in front of the large doors of the house in which you live, that is when your person is home, and that is your favourite time of the day. 

There are a few other persons that live in the house, but none of them are yours. They are nice enough towards you, but more distant than your person is. Your person is love and light and deep calming voice, and he is your person, and your favourite thing in the world. 

Your person found you when you were just a puppy, and you were dropped with your brothers and sisters in a box near bins that smelled of rotting food. You all tumbled together for a while but you were hungry, and you were thirsty, and one by one by one your brothers and sisters stopped playing with you because they’d stopped moving. And then you were the only one still moving, though you didn’t feel good at all, and you just wanted to sleep...

But then there were hands underneath your little form and you were being picked up by someone big and warm and scary--you tried to yelp but the noise would not pass your throat--you closed your eyes and breathed out, hoping for the pain in your belly to stop soon. 

Your person took you home. 

He was not yet your person; no, at first you mistrusted him, even when he was feeding you milk from something that was not your mother but felt like it in your mouth, even when he was gently bathing you, dipping you in warm water and working the mats out of your new fur with a comb, making a nest of blankets that smelled like something that wasn’t your brothers and sisters and so made you so agitated you whined and screamed for something familiar. But he grew to be your person, and now you can’t imagine any other person in the world being yours. 

He nursed you back to health when it was too difficult for you to take more than two or three steps at a time before crashing down onto the cold floor of your person’s bedroom. You shivered, and he noticed, and he put a heater in his room so that the floor was nice and warm for you to practice walking on. 

You hear the door open. You hear the familiar footfalls on the mat. You sprint. 

The home in which you live with your person and the other people in his house is a relatively large one, and you sprint through hallways and down stairways to where you see your person. 

He has tried to teach you not to jump up on people when they come in the door, and the training has mostly stuck--however, your excitement when your person enters the house is too much to rein in. You leap onto your hind legs, front paws stretching to claw your way up to a solid grip on his waist. You look up at him with your tongue hanging out and your ears as up as they can go, what with the fur that weighs them down, and even as you greet your person, your person greets you back. 

“Redbeard,” he says, his voice the light-happy-tone that you like the best, but...there is a tinge of something else in it, something that you want to fix because it is not so nice. “Hi, boy.” He ruffles the ears the way he knows that you like, and leans to kiss the top of your head. “How was your day?” His voice lifts in the way that you know will be followed by the short period of silence, like he’s waiting for you to try and speak back to him in the same language that he directs at you. But of course you cannot, and so he continues. “I’ll tell you about mine. _Lord,_ I will tell you about mine.” 

And he gently dislodges you from your grip above his hips, the bag that he takes out every morning swinging on his shoulder and almost hitting you but not quite, because he jerks it away at the last moment. “Come on,” he says, and you recognise the command but it isn’t necessary because even as your person is climbing the stairs up to the room where the both of you sleep, you are trotting at his heels, your claws clicking on the wood, nearly getting stepped on in your eagerness to stick close by him. This is your routine--he will walk to the room with the soft bed that both of you share and he will throw his bag on that soft bed with a heavy thump that scares you when you aren’t expecting it. Then he’ll push it away, towards the wall, and he’ll drop down onto it with a squeak. You’ll jump up after him and the two of you will curl up together. 

This routine goes off without a hitch today, and soon enough he is curled around you and your head is resting on your paws, your eyes looking to his. He has eyes that you trust, the colour of water and grass and sky up above, hair almost the same colour as yours. You love him. You love him so much your heart could burst but instead you just let out a long sigh through your nostrils and look at him. 

“I have a new partner for chemistry,” he tells you. This is when he starts talking, and his voice is low and deep and nice. You could listen to your person’s voice forever, and luckily he talks to you a lot. 

“I have a new partner for chemistry,” he repeats, after he lets out a very long sigh, longer than yours. “And his name is John Watson, and he is _stupid.”_

He laughs, the kind of laugh that lets you know that it’s not actually indicating amusement. And after that, you just listen, letting his voice wash over you, looking straight into those eyes. 

“No, I suppose that isn’t strictly speaking fair,” your person continues. “I suppose by the standards of this awful excuse for a school, he isn’t nearly as stupid as some. But he’s still stupid. He wants to be a doctor but he doesn’t understand the first thing on how to write chemical formulae. He’s a new student and his father is in the military which is why he’s coming to college the middle of sixth form; he doesn’t get on with his sister and his mother died recently. He plays rugby, he’s probably going to try and join the team, which means he’s going to fall in with all the other boys that like to kick my legs out from under me before I have a chance to remember my judo and call me insufferably ableist things like they’re better than me, which, of course, Redbeard, is ridiculous.” 

You do not know what any of this means. You lean forward and lick his face, and he smiles but gently pushes you away so that he can keep talking. “I don’t know what to make of him yet. It’s like...he’s just like the rest of them, just as stupid, just as placid as all the others. But he was...strangely patient. I know that I can be a lot to handle. I explained to him eight different ways to improve mathematical thinking, as kind of a test, because everyone else in the school would just tell me to shut up and stop being such a know-it-all freak. But...he was...almost...” He appears to be looking for a word. You wait, silently. “Interested.” 

You lick his face again. He nudges you away again. 

“Of course, the second he gets under the influence of the inevitable rugby mates, because his muscular stature and hand-eye coordination is definitely within the higher end of the acceptable range for the team, which quite frankly is utterly abysmal this year....Not that I would know from anything more than a passing glance on the way to take the bus home, obviously, Redbeard. Anyway, the second they get him under their wing he’s going to become just like the rest.” A pause. “Same old, same old, I suppose.” 

Your person falls silent. You curl up a little closer to him, trying to lick his face yet again. This time he lets you, and you taste different types of food and you smell the usual mixture of smells that are different than that around the house and yard to which you are at liberty. You lick until everything blurs together and his eyes are close and chuckles are shaking his frame, which you like because now your person feels a lot happier. 

“We’ll see what happens,” he sighs, once he has wiped his face of your love but left enough traces for you to feel sure that he does truly love you. “We’ll see what happens,” he says again, and then he propels himself up and over your curled body. You are disappointed until you see that he is reaching for the leather leash on his desk. Immediately, excitement thrums through you. Your person taking you on a walk is your absolute favourite thing, and you are quick to scramble off the bed and glue yourself to his knee. 

“Come on, Redbeard,” your person says, and clips the lead on. “Need to distract myself from John Watson.”


End file.
